Among professional photographers, Instagram can be a bit of a black sheep; however, those holding this belief may want to rethink their stance. We have spoken to numerous photographs who have gotten paid work through Instagram, and now, Getty Images has awarded three photographers $10,000 in grants to further their work.

Sue Llewellyn reports on the TNW blog that Getty images has introduced a radical new embedding feature that will make some 35 million images available to bloggers fro free non-commercial use…
Photographers’ reactions to this news are eagerly awaited.

“Innovation and disruption are the foundation of Getty Images, and we are excited to open up our vast and growing image collection for easy, legal sharing in a new way that benefits our content contributors and partners, and advances our core mission to enable a more visually-rich world,” said Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images, in a statement.

This move is in response to the rampant and illegal use of copyrighted images all over the Internet, from bloggers and other publishers who have neither the budget to buy photos nor a concept of copyright law and how they may be violating it with a simple right-click.
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Getty Images will serve the image in a YouTube-style embedded player, which will include full copyright information and a link back to the image’s dedicated licensing page on the Getty site.

This strategy solves several major problems: It assures proper image attribution, the images link back to the Getty site, and Getty can track where and how the images are being used.